Beast Quest 23 – Blaze the Ice Dragon

Adam Blade's Blaze the Ice Dragon is a chilly Beast Quest adventure for 7 year olds about a dragon that breathes ice instead of fire.

What happens

This quest is a personal one for Tom. His father, Taladon, is trapped as a ghost, and the only way to make him flesh and blood again is to win back all six pieces of a magic amulet. Each piece is guarded by one of the evil wizard Malvel's Ghost Beasts. Tom already has four. Blaze is the fifth.

He and Elenna come home to Avantia and find it wrong. It's summer, but a pond is frozen solid and there's frost on the grass. Stonewin's volcano, which has smoked every day of Tom's life, has gone cold.

Then they find something worse. A village called Rokwin is sick with a plague spread by hyena bites. A rider slides off his horse in front of them and dies before he hits the ground. Villagers in the woods fire flaming arrows at them and catch them in a net, terrified of strangers bringing the sickness in.

The nice thing is that they stop to help. Elenna remembers that her aunt used willow bark for animal bites and gets the villagers brewing medicine. Tom leads the whole pack of hyenas into a maze of dark woods and loses them there. It's a small quest before the big one, and it shows who these two are.

Blaze himself is a proper nightmare. He's a long, snaky dragon with icy blue fangs, and he can turn into a see-through ghost whenever Tom's sword comes near. He creeps up while Tom's asleep and coils round him until his ribs start to crack. And his eyes look strangely human...

There's a lovely clever bit too, when Tom realises his shadow can do what his sword can't. Your reader will enjoy working out why before he does.

It's quite dark in places. There's the plague, a man dying on the road, and some hard fighting with the hyenas. Children who are frightened of illness or of animals attacking might need a hand with the opening. Beast Quest fans who like a real threat will race through it.

What to read next

To see how Taladon came back as a ghost in the first place, start the amulet quest with Nixa the Death Bringer.